Same alarmist nonsense as on gafsetera here? Come on.
That quote can be interpreted any number of ways, especially this part
“Of course, every game ends after a number of years, some service type games function even after 10 years, but outside our main source of income, meaning big names, it’s building a stable source of income.”
The idea that they will put lootboxes into Cyberpunk is the least likely of the possible interpretations.
What is much more likely, is that he is talking about creating games like gwent, which have fair free to play model while running in game as service mode, and them interacting with the Big Games (they cannot even transcribe properly - he says big games, not big names). You know, same way Gwent interacts with TW3, being in the same world and all that.
Here is the original source, the quote comes from part where they talk about gwent and it is all lot less scandalous than dumb “jurnalizm” would have you believe.
Beautiful, and deserved, shots fired. Lootboxes and any kind of predatory monetization scheme that preys on people’s psychology and grows kids into future gambling addicts need to go fuck itself already.
I don’t know if this is just me reading way to much into your posts here @Paul_cze , but I get the distinct impression you like Witcher 3 and CD Projekt Red - its just a vibe I’m getting - Am I close?
I like every company that behaves in a great way and delivers consistently fantastic games - CDP, Larian Studios, Obsidian, 4A Games, IO Interactive, Arkane, Naughty Dog…
Not sure. Open world in a technological age is harder to pull off IMO. Just getting around is challenging in a pre-industrial world and you can build moment to moment gameplay out of that. Seems like the emphases are different in a more modern world. I hope they handle it with the aplomb we expect. I wonder if a smaller game in this setting would be a better testbed for it, in the same way there were three Witchers.
They just need to make cities - Cities where you walk around, or take a tram or somesuch to major areas. That should work out fine. There can also be large wilderness areas, where wild beasts / people roam, so its not a good idea to take noisy vehicles. Plenty of opportunities!
Right, that’s my hope. But they already had good Witcher games to move to an open world. They don’t have good Cyberpunk games to start from this time. They’re kind of starting from the top of a different mountain.
Having gotten into the Witcher 3 recently, I was reminded of this game again, and about the recent kerfuffle about the Glassdoor stuff. Came across a good vid that seems to have a balanced perspective (which still comes out fairly critical of CDPR, but still giving them some benefit of the doubt).
The gist of it seems to be that while they’ve got great ideas and great drive, they probably could be more efficient, pump out more product with less effort, and that their method of burning up talent at a rate of knots while they klutz around changing their minds about this and that is going to hit a wall at some point, when talented people steer clear of them, so they’d better get their management shit together.
Ugh. That dude is the worst dude on Youtube. Seriously, he’s the fucking worst. His videos are all polemic, half-witted rants that are poorly sourced and basically steal whole cloth from the work of others. Fuck him.
Gist of it all: People who left a company because they didn’t like it or were involuntarily terminated have bad things to say about it.
I know what you mean, that’s my first reaction - all the Witcher games have been great games, and great games are still rare enough that whatever (consensual) voodoo a developer uses to make them is alright in my book.
BUT: from CDPR’s point of view, chaotically chewing through talent and spitting it out may not be a sustainable solution, and the worry is whether they’ve already reached that point with the Cyberpunk game - i.e., the worry would be, have they outworn their welcome and are they going to have difficulty finding good people to work on the new game?
Beyond any ethical issues–games /= people’s lives–I think this is a valid point. You can get away with crunch time or the like for a while, maybe a good long while, but eventually it burns everything and everyone out. True in any industry; you can’t run like a startup forever. Silicon Valley does this all the time; they startup, get all their eager young employees to work themselves to death on the promise of stock options or the like, burn most of the out, and in the end, a select few actually wind up with any money, usually at the cost of their sanity, relationships, and non-work lives. It “works” for the guys at the top, the ones who run the scheme and get the rewards, but it’s a shitshow for everyone else. Worst of all, usually there’s precious little in actual product to show for it at the end, despite the few big payoffs for individuals.
CDPR at least has three products that are solid, so it’s not quite the same, but if their workplace psychology is anything similar, it’s not going to end well.
It’s the same in every profession really, and even in non-commercial things like medicine. Even in my own erstwhile profession, music, we’d think nothing of working for weeks on an album round the clock, subsisting on a shit diet and 6 hours sleep, with no downtime. It’s kind of acceptable to put young people through a trial by fire and overwork them like that - and to an extent, there’s a window of time where actually it’s fine, because that kind of pressure is how aspiring young professionals learn, and they positively enjoy it.
It’s when you start bringing family life into the mixture, and when people get a bit older, that it starts to become a pain in the ass. And at that point, also, the presumption is that a more experienced professional is able to do more with less effort anyway - or, to have the nous to be able to inveigle some younger minions to do some of the donkey work for them :)
